


Iron curtains, red rock

by daroos



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Telepathy, au: telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 22:57:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2168385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daroos/pseuds/daroos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after bringing in the Black Widow, Clint Barton is asked to take a crack at her mental shielding. Telepath AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Iron curtains, red rock

“You brought her in. I figured you might have some... insight.” Coulson glanced at the video feed. Romanov was chained to a chair in a psy-shielded room behind six inches of concrete and a two inch thick steel door.

“I’m not psy-ops,” Clint replied with a frown. “They’ve got the big guns.”

It was true -- Clint was a middling to mediocre telepath, a slightly better empath, and really only good at shielding. Years of trauma and abuse and being hunted like an animal had taught him to suck his mind inward and close up tighter than a clam, so not even a whisper of his presence eked out.

“They do. And they aimed their biggest guns at her, and they got nothing.”

“Nothing?” Clint gawped.

“A nose bleed. They warned any more and they could cause brain hemorrhage and make all of this worthless.”

Clint had seen one of the specially trained psy-ops team take out waves of attackers, paralyze suicide bombers before they could let their dead man switches go, and psychosomatically blind whole crowds of civilians. “That’s like shooting an ant with a flamethrower and having the ant just walk it off.”

Coulson quirked an eyebrow.

“What am I gonna do that they can’t?”

Coulson shrugged. “I don’t know, but that’s why you’re doing it, and not me.”

“Coulson,” Clint whined.

He held up a hand. “Just. Try. Just go in there and try.”

“Is this a Feeling of yours?”

“Please?”

Clint sighed. He disarmed himself at the guard posting, stripped down to his trainers and his cargo shorts and his holey undershirt, because his overshirt had a blade sewn into one of the cuffs, and she might be chained up and she might have not killed him the once but he wasn’t going to take any chances. Two guards walked him to her door and let him in. They locked it behind him, and the thunk made him startle.

A trickle of dried blood rimmed Romanov’s nostrils. A clean patch marked one lip where she’d swiped her tongue through the brownish stain. Her eyes rose to meet his. “You here to try to break me?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure what I’m here for,” he admitted.

“Then you’ve already lost. The others at least had the strength of their convictions: your mind is weak as a kitten and soft as a peach.”

Clint smirked, but it was laced with bitterness and hurt, and not much amusement at all. “Soft in the head is the least of the things I’ve been called.”

He squatted, a bit more than arm’s reach from her chair, and looked up into her face. Eyes were the windows to the soul, and she made no game about giving him a peek into hers. She met his gaze with challenge, and contempt, and a deep sort of fire.

Every mind was different. Children learned from a young age to shield themselves for the sake of politeness, but each shield was unique. The most common among SHIELD agents felt rather like a fence, and any attempt to breach it resulted in a rattle and a bounced return, like a basketball hitting chain link. This was the institutional sort of defenses: it was sometimes accompanied by the sting of razor wire, or a mental zap of electricity. Other minds, not so militant in training regime, were shielded by clouds of static, like buzzing gnats, or with a leathery, gummy exterior to hide their juicy squirt of emotions, like a fruit gusher. The rare mind had a mote, or a mine-field, or a mist of fog, but Romanov was something like he had never seen before.

She was a wall of red granite that rose higher than he could perceive. Her walls were perfectly smooth, without seam or join, and to his psychic perception, went on all the way to infinity. He gathered himself like he had been taught, focused his mind to the point of an arrow, and soared to her defenses.

He wasn’t certain what he had been expecting. In previous encounters where he’d tried similar gambits he’d been repulsed, he’d been tangled and thwarted, he’d slowed before he hit his mark like a fly caught in jello, and more often than not, he’d succeeded. The psychic impact was instant and painful, like a stiletto through the brain. There was no give, no chip in her shielding, not a ripple of response.

He fell back on his butt and clutched his head. A tiny whimper of pain escaped him, and she smirked down at him. “See?” she said.

He frowned. Never let it be said that Clint Barton gave up on a stupid idea after a single, painfully bad failure. His thoughts slid back to the last time he’d been in that much pain: the same woman had been the cause, but he’d been busy keeping her lung inflated while they awaited medevac from the place he’d been assigned to kill her.

“Why don’t you wear a goddamned vest?” he’d shouted down at her, a finger in her bullet wound. The bullet hadn’t been his, but the arrow to the leg that had brought her down enough to _take_ the bullet, had been.

“I’m counterintelligence,” she wheezed. “In the field, all we have is ourselves.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, and regrouped his mental faculties. He approached more slowly -- at a walk if he had a physical analogy for the speed. He imagined himself as a man, standing in the rocky earth at the foot of her massive wall of red granite, stretching into the sky. He put his hand on the stone, feeling the rough-smooth texture under his fingertips. It felt warm; warm like twining your fingers in the hairs at the nape of another's neck; warm like sun-baked rocks after dark; warm like an exhaled breath. He spread his mental fingers, and pressed his whole forearm, and the warmth was the same.

 _All we have is ourselves_ echoed in his mind, and he pressed his psyche against her in every way he could, like a lover, and a brother, and a friend. He didn’t try to force or push, but just existed, resting against her warmth, pressed up against the very thinnest parts of his own thin barrier between himself and the world.

The sound she made was tiny -- an ‘oh’ of surprise -- and it was like he was turned upside down in a fish bowl, subsumed within an igneous tomb that was this woman. He pulled back mentally and scooted on his ass and his palms until his shoulders hit the back wall. He pulled in big gulps of air, his eyes wide.

Romanov looked just as panicked as he felt.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he chanted, and her panting breaths turned to panting sobs. “Wait, no, no don’t cry. Please don’t cry, I’m sorry.” He curled up behind his clamshell shields, smaller and tighter than the last time he’d been beat.

“Where did you go?” she cried, her eyes wide.

“What?”

“You were—” She reached for him, and it was like the caress of a landslide, her rough, panicked edges rumbling and tapping over the surface of him. She wasn’t freaked because he’d broken through her walls -- she was freaked because he slipped away and disappeared. Her fingers strained towards him, but she was too well secured to escape or move much at all.

“No, I’m here. I’m here.” He crawled forward and laced their fingers together, squeezing hard.  
\--  
“I thought she was going to break your fingers,” Coulson admitted. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking she was scared and hurt and I’d left her all alone.”

“How did you get through?” Coulson asked in the mild way he had that hid a rabid curiosity.

Clint’s eyebrows crinkled together. “There was nothing to get through.”

“You mean—”

“She doesn’t shield. It’s just... her. By trying to force our way in, we were taking a crack at her very sense of self. Only way through that is to break her down completely, or be let inside.” He stared down at his hands for a moment. “I can’t believe she let me in.”

Coulson’s crows feet wrinkled in a smile that smile overshadowed the retroactive fear. “You did good.”


End file.
